A coalition of content industry players and ISPs today announced an anticipated collaborative effort to “curb online content theft,” described in more detail on a dedicated website for the initiative. The PR materials put out by the group are more telling for what they don’t say than what they do.

In its ongoing battle against music piracy, the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) is backing a bill in the California legislature, SB 550, which permits the police to disregard the Fourth Amendment. SB 550 would allow law enforcement to search without a warrant any CD, DVD, Blu-Ray or other “optical disc” manufacturer to ensure the discs they are producing carry legally required identification marks. SB 550 easily passed in the Senate yesterday and is now headed to the State Assembly.

Bogus copyright and trademark complaints have threatened all kinds of creative expression on the Internet. EFF's Takedown Hall of Shame collects the worst of the worst. Today, we welcome two new additions to our gallery of villains.

One of the less-heralded issues in a series of prominent cases (here, here, and here, for example) testing the limits of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act ("DMCA") safe harbor provisions is the question of when and how service providers must terminate the accounts of "repeat infringers." As a condition of safe harbor eligibility, the DMCA requires that service providers "adopt and reasonably implement" a repeat infringer policy that provides for termination of users' accounts "in appropriate circumstances." But what does this requirement mean? How does one “adopt and reasonably implement”? Who are "repeat infringers"?